Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. XXXI1X 
by Weldon on Inheritance was drafted, and some of the early chapters 
were written. ; 
The book on Inheritance occupied most of the remainder of the year, 
and to aid it forward and help those of us who were not biologists to clearer 
notions, Pearson suggested to Weldon a course of lectures in London to his 
own group of biometric workers. The project grew, other departments of the 
College desired to attend, and ultimately the lectures were thrown open to 
all members of the University and even to the outside public. The lecturer 
had a good audience of more than a hundred, and enjoyed the return to his 
old environment. 
The letters of Weldon to both Francis Galton and Pearson during the 
years 1904 and 1905 are full of inheritance work, the details of the great 
mice-breeding experiment, the statement and the solution, or it might be the 
suggested solution, of nuclear problems leading to detrimental theories ot 
inheritance. Occasionally, there would be a touch of conscience, and the 
drawings for the Crustacea would be pressed forward :— 
“T ought to give my whole time to the ‘Cambridge Natural History ’ 
for a while. They had been very good to me, and I have treated them 
more than a little badly. I am rather anxious to get them off my 
conscience.’—(Oxford, February 15, 1905.) 
But only the chapter on “ Phyllopods ” was completed, figures and all, and 
was set up in type. Many figures were prepared for other parts; beautiful 
things, which gave Weldon not only scientific but artistic pleasure, he had 
made, but the text remains a mere fragment. In the same way but little 
was absolutely completed of the article on “ Heliozoa” for Lankester’s 
“Natural History.” It was not Weldon’s biometric friends who kept him 
from these tasks, but solely his own intense keenness in the pursuit of new 
knowledge. 
The fascination of inheritance problems kept him, however, for months at 
a time at the Heredity book. At Exeter, 1905, he went to Ferrara because 
that place had a university, and as such must have a library, where work 
could be done. The contents of the library were perfectly medieval, a 
characteristic appropriate in the castle, but hardly helpful in heredity. 
Still, portions of the manuscript came to England for comment and 
criticisms, and we were hopeful that the end of the year would see the book 
completed. 
It must not be thought for a moment that Weldon was desultory in his 
work. As Sir Ray Lankester says in a letter: “His absolute thoroughness 
and unstinting devotion to any work he took up were leading features in his 
character.” He pursued science, however, for sheer love of it, and he would 
have continued to do so had he been Alexander Selkirk on the island with 
no opportunity of publication and nobody to communicate his results to. 
He never slackened in the energy he gave to scientific work, but having 
satisfied himself in one quest he did not stay to fill in the page for others to 
